About Michelle Malkin and the Starbucks 'bomb' story---
The Ready, Fire, Aim problem...
which I credit to Rove/Atwater/Segretti worship among elements of the neo-conservative community, stands, pants down, in a clear bright light here.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/01/13/starbucks.no.bomb.ap/When, after a lot of verbiage down the drain, it was discovered that the 'IED' was, in point of fact, a flashlight.
This arm flapping hysteria over a deranged bum in a Starbux, while the ports of the United States remain essentially unguarded shows how out of touch, how xenophobic we have become on what constitutes security for the *American people*.
The Iraq fiasco, in concert with a staggering off-shore deployment of military resources anywhere we feel the need to strong arm our economic interests, puts America at far greater risk than Saddam and Osama combined (which of course, we never were from the combination, at least).
And make no mistake, we are using the insanely bloated American military to protect and engross corporations, not American citizens.
Our corporatist administration is comprised of failed capitalists-- people who could not find oil in Bahrain, not run a oilfield supply industry without taking on the radioactive albatross that was Dresser industries, people who punish Amtrak for working, while pumping obscene amounts of corporate welfare into the airline industry. They hate the free market, and do not believe in competition. Why else would the Iraq occupation be a no-bid contract operation?
In the early 1990's, in a class on the politics of 'developing nations' I talked for a class period on globalization and asymmetrical warfare. I predicted then, as I still do now, that if a nuclear device is ever detonated in the US by a hostile, the delivery system will be FedEx or UPS. Note that the most damaging bio-terrorist attack in US history was delivered by the USPS-- and the perp remains uncaught. Worse, I see no serious effort to mitigate these vulnerabilities. Instead, we are given a non-functioning return of the idiot son of SDI.
The current corporatist administration aside, 'they' do not hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we talk freedom while economically enslaving (or supervising the enslavement) of a large segment of the world. Before the AIDs epidemic ravaged africa, there was Nestle. Watch South and Central America to see blowback for 30 plus years of evil policy in action.
We 'champion' democracy while supporting horrorific dictatorships, or creating client states with the look of democracy, but the feel of militarist puppet states. We don't do that for the safety of Jane Smith in Springfield Missouri. We do that for Enron, Westinghouse, Bechtel, General Dynamics and other corporations that collectively thrive with their foot on the throat of a soi disant free market.
We cannot spread democracy with willy pete, it didn't work in 'Nam, it won't work in Iraq or Afghanistan. We spread democracy by supporting education, open government, fair distribution of wealth, honest, well regulated business, and by respecting the state motto of Missouri, even for the citizens of places far removed from Missouri. 'Let the good of the people be the supreme law.'
And while I am on the left side of the political spectrum, it is to be noted that no less a conservative than Kevin Phillips, author of Nixon's southern strategy makes many of the same points I make here. And well, Dwight Eisenhower's final speech as president... says it all for me.
Having said all this, I am heartened to see pockets of clear thinking among members of the Republican party. I doubt you see it my way on universal healthcare, or free public education to the baccalaureate level, but there is not a lot of daylight between some of our concerns if not our solutions.
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